Why Ferrari abandoned its latest F1 upgrade

abandoning an upgrade package is always bad news for a Formula 1 scene Ferrari removing its latest floor and side pod upgrade during the British Grand Prix weekend shows the alarm bells are ringing at Marinello and they should be loudly Ferrari is suffering from one of the key problems that limits performance with formula 1's ground effect cars in the bouncing or purposing It suffers from in high-speed Corners that's become worse since the latest upgrade package was deployed at last month's Spanish Grand Prix but worryingly for Ferrari Color science calls this an intrinsic weakness so why has it become so big a problem that Ferrari took the extreme step of ditching the floor and Bodywork changes for Silverstone especially considering it wasn't long ago the Ferrari sf24 was emphatically the second best car of 2024 and Red Bull's closest Challenger Ferrari made a small performance step with a package introduced to Ima in May the upgrade featured modified front and rear wings but the key changes were to the side pod Inlet and the floor the side pod Inlet was originally a more vertical shape but a dier moveed towards more of a letter box style this created space to improve the air flow through the undercut at the front of the side pod and around the side of the car the visible floor changes were small with a small Inlet duct appearing on the edge of the floor but there were more significant tweaks underneath and out of view the Spain package focused on floor changes but also further refined the sideb undercut shape the floor changes were to the fences the edges the diffuser and the floor body that included lowering the roof at the front of the floor for Ferrari senior engineer J CLE said this upgrade had been somewhat fast-tracked but was very much along similar lines to the imar update in terms of continuing on the same development path while much of Ferrari's development progress over the past year has been focused on improving the consistency of the car to make it more benign after rear instability made it tricky to drive in the first half of last season clear described the Spain package as an incremental upgrade a little more downforce a little less drag unfortunately the Gams the team expect Ed the upgrade to bring in terms of performance have not been delivered because of the high-speed bouncing problems the car is suffering from however when the speed of the corners dropped below the threshold for purposing they found the car worked as anticipated that's why in terms of downforce generation team principal Fred verer says that the new parts are correlating with the data from the wind tunnel the trouble is that although you can simulate the downforce produced that there are other characteristics that aren't so easy to detect in the wind tunnel and cfd but even without the bouncing SCI say high-s speeed Corners are a weakness but that the bouncing problems increase the deficit in such turns or as he puts it makes the Ferrari accelerated slow in the quick stuff the positive is that the upgrade was doing what it should be in slower Corners as science says we see it working when we have no bouncing for the British Grand Prix Ferrari attempted to improve the rigidity of the floor in order to eliminate the problem Charlotte cler ran the upgraded package throughout Friday with science on the old specification although the latest spec was faster it it was noticeably trickier to drive from Saturday onwards both ran the old spec car this made the car slower but easier to drive as a result Ferrari was firmly fourth best of the top four teams at Silverstone and SS finished a distant fifth teammate charl lir was running seventh when he made the disastrous decision to pit for intermediates too early finishing a laps 14th and continuing a run of races he describes as worse than a nightmare the talk of bouncing will surprise those who thought this was was a problem vanquished in the early days of this rule set in 2022 but the fact is that it is always there lurking for ground effect cars the current F1 machines are the most advanced ground effect racing cars ever made teams are constantly pushing the limits of what they are capable of given the closer to the ground you run the more downforce you produce that's exactly where you need to put the car the trouble is you risk triggering bouncing and the reason it is a problem in quick Corners is the higher the speed of the car the more downforce is created by the powerful Venturion tunnels in the underfloor as you get lower so the downforce increases exponentially but there's a point where the proximity to the ground exceeds the capacity of the floor to deal with the air flow and you get an aerodynamic stall that reduces downforce and the car Rises then the stall clears and the downforce builds again until it hits the stall point and that causes the bouncing you can get bouncing on the Straits and Ferrari has a bit of that but in Corners under lateral load even Ultra stiff F1 cars are no longer running flat relative to the ground so one side of the floor is closer than the other and science stresses that is the problem so Ferrari has a car that does produce more downfalls thanks to running the floor more aggressively however what it can't do is generate that aerodynamic load without hitting bouncing problems and that's something that Red Bull McLaren and Mercedes can do and while bouncing is easy to trigger for teams for example Red Bull encountered a little in Spain but could dial it out it's a problem Ferrari keeps hitting so how does Ferrari solve this well if we had the answer to that we'd probably be ready for a job as a highly paid head of Arrow at Marinello but Ferrari is working on a fix the Troublesome upgrade package is expected to return in Hungary although the team has yet to confirm that it's also likely to be in modified form as it's clear there's a fundamental problem Ferrari needs to fix in order to run the car close enough to the ground to generate the downfall it wants without hitting trouble forer admits that in the longer term it's likely that the Spain update will have to be replaced by a new package that the team is working to develop the experiments on Friday at Silverstone where the cars ran in different configurations will be crucial in this process with L clerk saying the team learned a lot for sir liken this to the experimentation Ferrari did last year at zandvoort compromising Friday practice to focus on test work that set it in a positive direction and verer is hopeful that his team can repeat the trick Ferrari's problem is an aerodynamic one as verer is confirmed while the suspension plays a key part in this there's another car in the field that suggests this isn't the root of the problem that's the H vf24 which has the same mechanical platform as the Ferrari thanks to the team's technical partnership niiko hulkenberg even out qualified both Ferrar at Silverstone when I asked H aerodynamics team leader Luca matelli whether his car suffered from the same problems Ferrari did he said bouncing has not been a problem for it in 2024 once more H also uses the Ferrari wind tunnel meaning that it's not a hardware problem that's making the difference and while it's likely that Hass is not chasing the downfall quite as aggressively as Ferrari and therefore might have a car that's a little more confidence inspiring for the driver that's a concern for those at Marinello the Ferrari does have more downforce in its upgraded spec but it's causing other problems and make no mistake bouncing does cost time and can also work the tires harder the trouble is it might not be a quick fix what's more Ferrari is fighting to sort it after the departure following the British Grand Prix of technical director enrio carday who will join Aston Martin but Ferrari needs to act fast because if it's going to keep Pace with its Rivals at the front it needs to crack this problem and make the car significantly less prone to bouncing so where are the rest of the field in terms of bouncing troubles well as mentioned the super stiff Red Bull can encounter it but it's easy to adapt the car to dial it back that's something Ferrari has not been able to do however Red Bull has also struggled at times with its extreme lateral stiffness at the rear meaning the car lacks suspension compliance hence its Monaco struggles the ML and Mercedes appear to be a long long way from inducing such problems although f1's fifth place team Aston Martin has struggled with this since introducing its own upgrade in Spain RB has no such problems however it has had to roll back on part of its own Spain upgrade running about 50% of it at Silverstone because it was struggling to achieve consistent through Corner balance that's another common problem with these cars when the arrow doesn't work consistently when in your so when turning through the corners Alpine has a car that struggles particularly for front end grip and battles under steer salba struggles for consistency in the high speed and doesn't ride bumps well Williams lacks for all round aerodynamic load but can run well at compromised downforce tracks while the H is a good consistent all round car but one that now struggles a little in the medium speed Corners the bottom line is that with these regulations there are always limitations to be hit but bouncing is one of the most difficult ones to eliminate and performance sapping and that's why getting on top of it is essential for Ferrari's hopes of keeping Pace with its Rivals at the front and being in a position to fight for the title next

Channel: THE RACE

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Keywords: f1, formula 1, formula one, F1 news, F1 latest, F1 updates, F1 explained, The Race, the-race.com, grand prix, f1 2024

Id: d7VKWWpRxmk

Length: 8min 38sec (518 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2024